I've been working on the Codex card game for a lot of years, and it will finally be up on Kickstarter early next week.

Instead of having just a deck of cards, you actually bring a "codex" of cards to the game, and that's the card pool you can pull from. You build your deck from that as you play, and there's a couple turns of lag time between when you add cards from you codex to your deck, and when you actually play them. This happens to fit really well with the RTS video game theme (like in Warcraft 3 and StarCraft) of build orders under a fog of war. The "build order" is the particular set of cards you chose to get this game and the "fog of war" means that you and your opponents don't quite know who is building towards what until a little bit after it's already in motion.

Plus, it has a bunch of great art. Here's some sample cards. Notice how each card type has its own card frame so you can immediately tell which type of card it has.

The unit cards are closeups, rather than battle scenes, so you can actually see the portrait clearly even when the card is across the table from you. The spell and upgrade cards show giant icons, as if that was the button you'd click in an RTS video game to cast the spell.

If you'd like to know more about the game design of Codex, check out these three articles:

Even though the game has been in development for many, many years, I still need your help to actually manufacture it. So please consider joining next week's Kickstarter if you're looking for a deep strategy card game with hundreds of viable decks.